


blood in the water

by aalgorithm



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Fix-It, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Post Crisis Core
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aalgorithm/pseuds/aalgorithm
Summary: there's blood in the water but it tastes so sweet / the sky is on fire, let it rain on me
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 7
Kudos: 53





	blood in the water

**Author's Note:**

> This is in relation to my earlier zakkura story "you are my holy shroud." I imagine that, when the timelines crossed in the FF7 remake, that Zack's new timeline - wherein he doesn't die - had to have been affected. So here's Cloud's experience as he's briefly torn between the two realities. I hope that makes sense!

_blood in the water_

_(zack/cloud)_

Zack’s shoulder jutted painfully into Cloud’s cheek. The bone pressed into his jaw and thudded against his face with each lopsided step. Between each lunge forward Cloud’s consciousness faded, only to be smacked awake again by his savior’s arm. Thick, powerful, bleeding profusely, the limb held strong. When Cloud breathed in deep, he smelled iron, sweat, dust, and fading tendrils of safety. Warm and saturated.

It was a languid soup in which to become lost.

Through his eyelashes Cloud could see the deep slant of Zack’s torso, shredded and crimson in some parts in between the royal purple of his uniform. If he focused hard enough, he could see the familiar musculature shifting and pulling and straining. If he squinted, Cloud could nearly crane his gaze upward and catch a glimpse of his savior.

It wasn’t until they descended from the cliffside, however, could Cloud manage this. With each heavy footprint came a new wave of nausea that knocked him sideways, as though he’d taken the butt of the Buster Sword to his temple. It wasn’t until Zack had escorted them from the desert hilltops could Cloud see the fiery blue of his eyes.

“You’re darn lucky I love you, Strife,” his voice said, a few inches or a few thousand light years from his ear. “Otherwise I’d be giving you a piece of my mind. It’s _totally_ not fair that _I_ had to finish off all those SHINRA soldiers by myself…”

It was significant. Cloud’s fingers twitched once the words, uttered so casually like it was a banal, ordinary sentiment, registered unto Cloud’s rejuvenated senses. He became aware again of the thumping of his own heart; it was roaring like waves in his ears.

“Won’t be long till they catch up…” Zack muttered before taking a shaky step and throwing off his balance. From Cloud’s periphery he watched as Zack’s foot collided with a rock that had come loose on the cliffside. He felt his own arm, which Zack had threaded in and around his own, slide away from its sticking point. And when he made to cry out, the noise died in his lungs.

“ _Cloud!_ ”

Cloud toppled away from Zack and rolled like ragdoll down the mountainous landscape. He felt stones and sharp, thick grains of sand cut into his face, arms, and legs until his chest collided with a boulder and knocked the wind straight out of him.

He collapsed some thirty feet down, appendages still without movement, vision spiraling as though he’d just been released from Hojo’s lab that same and weeks ago. The wind howling in his ears and Zack’s panicked screaming sounded as though submerged beneath the green ichor of Hojo’s test tubes; Cloud couldn’t respond.

“Dammit, _Cloud_ …”

Two feet landed, firm and steady, just above his head, the back of which was growing moist and leaking red. Cloud could see the fringes of his blonde hair growing maroon. A splotch dropped onto his nose.

“Cloud…Cloud, can you hear me?”

He wasn’t able to answer; Zack knew that. In his mind, Cloud chastised him for the pointless question.

“Come on. Come on. Just give me _some_ thing.”

Zack’s hands, forever calloused and rough and coarse, scooped Cloud up by the neck and held him close. Their noses were but inches away.

“Cloud. I’m sorry. I slipped. I’m an idiot…Cloud, please…”

With everything he had, Cloud tried to refocus his vision on his savior, albeit a clumsy one, but his eyes felt like a kaleidoscope. No matter how he peered, no matter how he shifted, everything came up blurry. Zack’s countenance was reduced to a blue, green, and bloody plane that Cloud could not decipher.

“Don’t do this to me,” Zack cried, holding Cloud’s lifeless head to his chest. “Don’t do this. Not now…”

It wasn’t until the stench of iron became unbearable and the stream of blood began pooling into Cloud’s eyes did he consider the possibility that he was dying. Zack’s muffled cries began to fade as though the mako from Hojo’s test tubes was being flushed away, Cloud’s cognizance along with it.

He made to reach out for Zack’s form, tried to find purchase along his arms, his chest, the suspenders running from his waistline to his shoulders, even his mane of black, unruly hair. He’d spent plenty a night toying with fingers that wouldn’t move properly with these pieces of Zack Fair, touching them for assurance that he was still tied to the present and that he hadn’t yet seeped over into the Lifestream.

But Cloud felt nothing now. All such fragments of his savior ran like water through his hands, unable to be grasped. And slowly, as his connection to Zack ran dry, his senses reemerged. He smelled smoke and iron and rainfall. He heard the patter of raindrops on hardened rock, the rattle of broken breaths through damaged lungs. He felt a hot liquid dribble from his forehead down to the tip of his nose and the tight grasp of someone begging to be heard.

Cloud saw a thunderstorm raging overhead. Cloud saw himself before a cliffside, kneeling in the dirt, Midgar stationed not three miles away. Smoke from the city’s factories traveled like black plumes, lost souls, into the atmosphere, and drew tragic pictures before they disintegrated in the rain. Cloud watched them climb and climb until the melancholy of the moment grew too much, and then he saw his savior.

Zack Fair was bleeding out between Cloud’s knees. His chest was hole-punched with bullets, the tissue of his chest sliced and grated with the carnage. One of his hands as opening and closing around Cloud’s wrist, the other scrambling to retrieve his blade.

Cloud had died. Surely. He had to have. This wasn’t the cliffside he’d toppled down. This was the edge of Hell.

But he was speaking, responding, before he could think better of it.

“Both…of us?”

A threadbare smile drew itself across Zack’s lips. Cloud’s sight had never been clearer. He watched his savior’s cheeks were pinned into happiness, a light so staunch and out of place.

“That’s right…you’re gonna…”

Thunder cracked overhead. The sound nearly sent Cloud reeling.

“You’re gonna…?”

Rainwater rushed into Zack’s eyes, the luminesce of which had begun to fade. For the first time, Cloud saw what they’d once been: simply human.

“ _Live_.”

Zack’s reached behind Cloud’s neck and tugged him forward. It was an angelic touch; what it lacked in force it made up in sincerity. Cloud let his head be guided into Zack’s open wounds.

“You’ll be…my living legacy.”

The water mingled with his blood and stained Cloud with Zack’s essence. He felt cleansed. When he emerged, he bore his savior’s markings on his skin.

“My honor…my dreams…”

The blade of the Buster Sword dragged heavily against the rocky floor. Zack lugged it toward Cloud, blinking away the ichor stemming from a gash along his skull. Cloud watched as his own hands extended to receive the gift, unsure. Had he any say, he would have rejected it outright.

“They’re _yours_ now.”

As Cloud accepted the weapon, he could see Zack’s chest quicken in its descents. He was breathing heavier, struggling to complete the effort of bestowing something onto Cloud that was greater than Cloud could understand. He sent this something, encapsulated within, around, below, above the Buster Sword off with a final push. Cloud felt the weight instantly.

He did his best to put it into words.

“I’m…your living…legacy.”

It didn’t make sense. Even as Cloud’s tongue touched his teeth and lips to create the syllables, he didn’t know what they meant. He felt as though strings were manipulating his mouth.

Zack was bleeding from the head and from the chest. Cloud was without movement in his arms, not due to an influx of mako poisoning now, but due to shock. Fear. Horror. Confusion. Reverence, even, for the look that fell unto Cloud’s savior was holy, more peaceful than the sleepiest of infants, the gentlest of caresses, the softest of clouds.

And Cloud wanted to tear it off of him.

“ _No_ …” he murmured as Zack’s chest beat slower and slower. His eyelids were growing heavy.

“No, please. Zack –”

A pain struck Cloud in his throat, the space above his heart. He tasted iron. Thorns were jabbing into his jugular. The rainfall was stinging the new invisible wounds.

“Zack!”

The steely blue of Zack Fair’s irises, having replaced the vigorous, wild shade that mako had infused in him, disappeared. A tension left his jaw, the resistance to agonizing pain finally falling away. His lips parted, still perched upward into a smile, and the last of his warmth leaked through his throat. Cloud watched it float into the storm, green and vibrant only to be snuffed out by the chilled breeze.

Cloud gasped, feeling as though he’d swallowed razor blades. The breath wouldn’t come. The blood wouldn’t pump. The sense wouldn’t appear to him. The explanation never arrived.

He was face down in the dirt three miles outside of Midgar. Zack Fair was lugging him away from the legions of slaughtered SHINRA soldiers in search of Aerith. There was a heavy, humid sun in the sky and Zack was dehydrated – even when unconscious, Cloud could tell – but he wouldn’t stop pushing ahead. Zack was telling Cloud to hang in there, to keep breathing, to stay positive, to keep fighting. He was speaking so Cloud wasn’t alone. He was saving Cloud Strife.

So this was all wrong. Zack Fair’s blood was somehow all over Cloud’s hands, the roles seemingly reversed. Zack was now the forsaken, lying broken on Hell’s doorstep, and Cloud had been thrust into the limelight as his savior. And he was failing miserably.

Cloud couldn’t breathe. He could only scream. He could only scream and hold the Buster Sword close to his chest. His tears streamed into the rivers running red from Zack’s torso. They bled into the rain. They trickled into a new bottomless pit of grief the likes of which Cloud had never known nor expected to grow acquainted with.

He’d seen too much. Too much fire, too much debris, too many needles, too many syringes, too many guns, too many wounds, and too many losses. He wasn’t ready for this one. Why did Gaia demand he take this one?

Cloud screamed and clutched his head. He was bombarded with visions as something – a foreign energy, an unknowable entity, the airy voice of a woman – beat his head until he thought he might see stars.

Flashes of a future he didn’t want appeared to him; trains, mako reactors, crowded city streets, explosions, long brown hair tied into ponytails. Arms replaced with automatic weapons, specialty cocktails served across antique wooden bars, familiar red eyes and fists that pack a punch. Yellow and white lilies, magic convergence with the flowers, the Lifestream. Comrades dying on skyscrapers. Church steeples. Flames and gunfire. Materia. Hojo’s lab for a second time. Tifa. Headaches.

Sephiroth.

Searing, _blistering_ headaches.

Cloud screamed and screamed and screamed until it all vanished before his eyes.

\--

“Cloud!”

Cloud rejected the touch; he sent his arms forward in one thrust. His palms collided with something warm and solid.

“Cloud! Hey! It’s me!”

Cloud thrashed until “me” was off of him. He heard a thud and scrambled to attention, searching for balance amidst what he gathered to be a throng of blankets thrown atop a mattress.

“Hey! Hey!”

Breath flew into Cloud’s lungs in droves until he nearly choked. He coughed until his eyes went dark, clutching his throat while holding a hand to keep the mystery someone at bay.

He realized, however, as he drew his palm away, that there was no red staining the crevices of his skin. The same dirt lurked beneath his fingernails, nothing more.

“Cloud. Hey…”

Cloud turned to face whomever was addressing him.

“Are you okay?”

An angel, it seemed.

“ _Zack_?”

Illumed by an evening sunset reaching through the windows, Zack Fair knelt before Cloud. Bandages littered his grimy face. His tattered SHINRA uniform had been exchanged for a plain white shirt. Sweat pooled around his collar and underarms. Cloud followed the moisture with his eyes, tracing the outlines of Zack’s neck and biceps as he did so. Besieged with scrapes, cuts, and bruises though they may be, they were the same.

“Yeah. Yeah, buddy. It’s me,” Zack assured. He extended an arm towards Cloud, who leaned into the touch, electric, buzzing, unable to return from his high.

“How…?”

“You were just having a nightmare.” Zack grazed his thumb along Cloud’s shoulder. “Or a _seizure_ , maybe. I couldn’t really tell. This is the first time you’ve been awake. Are you okay?”

Cloud reached for Zack’s face. The scar remained, a small “x” carved into the porcelain skin of his cheek. Cloud ran his index finger across it gently, admiringly, reverently.

And if Cloud focused enough, he could bring himself to meet Zack’s eyes. So he did.

The shade was perfect, an intermingling of green and blue that nearly caused one to squint should they stare too long. Cloud watched in silence as the energy that thrummed within Zack – whether mako-induced or not – sent the colors of his irises swirling. And in the middle of the undulating chaos was a circle of nebulous black, inside of which Cloud could see himself.

“Zack.”

Cloud placed both hands on either side of Zack Fair’s face. He was nearly hot to the touch.

“Y-yeah. That’s me.”

Zack Fair had clamped a goodhearted palm on Cloud’s shoulder three years ago and bestowed unto him more motivation than Cloud would ever know what to do with. In the line of nameless SOLDIER hopefuls, Zack had taken an indiscriminate liking to Cloud Strife, and thus changed his life forever.

Embarrassed and loth to admit it, Cloud ended up being thankful for the helicopter’s crash-landing. The image of Zack Fair lighting up the snowstorm with his smile and memories of home stuck with Cloud. It inspired warmth when there was none.

And he remembered every night spent cradled in between Zack’s arms, within his person, as they traveled across Gaia, avoiding SHINRA and searching for a solution. He remembered the smell of Zack, a mix of earth, a burning fire, and rainfall, pressed against his face. He remembered the way his chest rose and fell. He remembered the way his eyes glistened beneath shooting stars. He remembered the stories he would tell about Gongaga, Aerith, his time with SOLDIER, Angeal, and everything in between.

And Cloud remembered Zack’s clandestine confessions, whispered late at night when Zack couldn’t sleep. He would lay with Cloud, shielding him, and hum through teary eyes about his loneliness, about his guilt regarding Angeal and Aerith, about how glad he was to have Cloud by his side, conscious or not. Cloud used to long for the chance to reciprocate and validate these secrets.

One night, after Zack had rolled Cloud onto the bed of a yellow truck and slapped the exterior, gesturing for the driver to pull off into the highway, Zack pressed his lips to Cloud’s temple. He held the touch for forever, the best forever Cloud could ever dream of, before divulging to him the following,

“You know I love you, right?”

This was him. This was the right Zack. He wasn’t bleeding out like an angel fallen from grace. He was alive and kicking and breathing and smiling and saving like always.

Cloud’s fingers traveled to behind Zack’s neck and pulled, disappointed to cut his view of Zack short but knowing the break would be worth it. And while Zack took on an expression of shock, dark brows thrown up wide and large into his forehead, he gave no defiance. He flowed into Cloud like divine blood into holy water.

They moved together just as Cloud knew they could, just as Cloud knew he’d always wanted. Cloud slotted his lips against Zack’s in a tender, elegant, nearly fearful motion, feeling each ridge and bump and divot and breath as he did so. And Zack, eyes just now sliding shut, returned for more. Cloud’s hands no longer graced but grabbed. Zack adjusted his stance, placed some of his weight on the edge of the mattress, and gripped the small of Cloud’s back, like his fingers were meant to fit nowhere else.

It isn’t until a harsh rapping sounded on the door did Cloud realize what he was really doing, and he pulled away in an instant, face so red his that vision was cast in a blush. Zack’s neck and ears went flush with heat.

“Payment due in an hour, boy!” a voice snarled from outside. “Don’t make me call them local hunters on you kids.”

“S-sure thing!” Zack stammered, tumbling off the mattress for a second time. “I’ll…I’ll be over in a minute to drop off the gil!”

Cloud was hot. He was sweating beneath the sheets. He was mortified. He felt a foreign pair of eyes set their sights on him in jealous and vengeful rage.

“Zack, I’m sorry –”

“Cloud. Don’t. Don’t worry. I’m –”

“Aerith. I didn’t think. I didn’t mean…it’s just, my dream, and –”

“Cloud, please.”

Zack crouched in front of him again. There was no stress nor anger in his countenance. If nothing else, Cloud detected a note of hope, vague traces of intrigue.

“What were you dreaming about?”

Cloud couldn’t see any scars. He couldn’t see any bullets. No shrapnel. No internal bleeding. No gash wound beneath the black of his hair, which had taken on the look of a porcupine, Cloud mused.

“You,” he finally answered. “You were dead. SHINRA killed you before we made it to…to…”

“Midgar,” Zack finished. “It sure was a dream then, because we’re in Midgar now. And I’m feeling pretty dandy, if I do say so myself.”

He chuckled and Cloud thought he might cry at the sound.

“What about Aerith? Did you find her? And where are we –”

“We just got here early this morning, bud. Just an old apartment building near Sector Five. Had to beg the landlady to let us in and we’re already strung up with a sixty gil bill. And I haven’t tracked down Aerith. I was more worried about _you_.”

Zack folded a piece of Cloud’s hair back behind his ear.

“You’re not dead,” Cloud stated.

“Don’t think so.”

Cloud clutched at Zack’s chest, just to be sure, just to draw him in closer again. The skin was smooth.

“Did…did you mean it?” Cloud asked. Zack looked at him from an angle, one eyebrow steepled upwards. It’s a look Cloud had nearly forgotten.

“When I was asleep. Did you mean what you said?”

Zack clutched at Cloud’s wrist.

“Mean what?”

“You know.”

Zack ran his tongue across his lips; Cloud knew, then, that he understood what he was talking about.

“It’s okay. If you didn’t mean it. I know…I know we’re in Midgar now. You’ve been trying to get here for ages. And, once you find her, I know you’ll want to…to be with…”

His throat became as dry as sandpaper. Zack didn’t help, either, just kept staring, kept waiting, the touch of his fingers creeping higher and high up Cloud’s arm, the arm he used to support himself as he sat to face his savior.

“Aerith. You’re looking for her. So if you didn’t mean it, I understand,” he finally admitted. “And I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that. I just thought you…I thought you were gone, but you look the same. You look right. Good. Your eyes. They’re how they’re supposed to be. And I was worried that you’d been shot, and –”

Zack’s entire form, the height and musculature of which Cloud had long since gawked over, rose as his touch reached for Cloud’s chin. Cloud followed his lead until they met in the middle once more. He opened his mouth as if to add another disclaimer, to explain himself further, only to take another gulp of Zack down into his stomach.

Zack moved toward Cloud, straddling his still weak hips between his knees. The touch wasn’t threatening, just another vote of safety for Cloud to drown in. Cloud propped himself against the bed’s headboard as Zack felt around the new – is it new? Is this new between them, or just a long-held dream so dedicated to memory finally acted upon? – terrain. His lips moved from Cloud’s mouth to his nose, cheeks, and jaw.

Cloud wrapped his grip around Zack’s waist, prompting the latter to come up for air. A moisture had welled up behind his eyelids now, and when Cloud reached out to stroke his waist, the tears spilled over.

“I meant it,” Zack replied. “I…I didn’t know you heard me. But I meant it.”

Cloud hadn’t a response at the ready, so he scanned Zack’s figure as the words slowly came to him.

“Good,” he decided upon. “I…I mean it to.”

“I’ve meant it for a while.”

“Me too.”

Through the melding of their bodies, Cloud felt the tendrils of something new take hold, something warmer, greater, and stronger than every night spent under the protection Zack Fair’s impressive physique, cherishing his earnest whispers. And Cloud meant this new something, too. He meant it more than he’d meant anything in a long, long time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I challenged myself and wrote this in about 3 hours. I needed an exercise while I'm editing my own larger project.


End file.
